“And so women can really like one another without jealousy?” he questioned, laughing.

“What is there to be jealous of?” she retorted quickly.  “For after all one is one’s self, you know, and not another.  Gerty is beautiful and I am not, but her loveliness is as keen a delight to me as it is to her—­keener, I think, for she is sometimes bored with it and I never am.  And she is more than this, too, for she is as devoted—­as loyal as she is lovely.”

“To you—­yes,” he answered slowly, for he was thinking of the Gerty whom he had known—­of her audacious cynicism, her startling frankness, her suggestive coquetry.  Was it possible that this creature of red and white flesh, of sweetness and irony, was really a multiple personality—­the possessor of divers souls?  Had he seen only the surface of her because it was to the surface alone that he had appealed?  Or was it that Laura’s creative instinct had builded an image out of her own ideals which she had called by Gerty’s name?  He did not know—­he could not even attempt to answer—­but the very confusion of his thoughts strengthened the emotional interest which Laura had aroused.  And as each new and vivid sensation effaces from the mind every impression that has gone before it, so at this moment, in the ardent awakening of his temperament, there existed no memory of the past occasions upon which other women had allured as irresistibly his inflamed imagination.  So far as his immediate reflections were concerned Laura might have been the solitary woman upon a solitary planet.  If he had paused to remember he might have recalled that he had fallen in love with the girl whom he afterward married between the sunset and the moonrise of a single day—­that his passion for Madame Alta leaped, full armed, into being during her singing of the balcony scene in “Romeo and Juliet”—­but he did not pause to remember, for with that singular forgetfulness which characterises the man of pleasure, the present sensation, however small, was still sufficient to lessen the influence of former loves.

They strolled slowly down to Gramercy Park, and this time, as they stood together before her door, she asked him, flushing a little, if he would not come inside.

“I only wish I could,” he answered, taking out his watch, “but I’ve promised to meet a man at the club on the stroke of five.  If you’ll extend the privilege, however, I’ll take advantage of it before many days.”

His words ended in a laugh, but she felt a moment afterward, as she entered the house and he turned away, that he had looked at her as no man had ever done in her life before.  She grew hot all over as she thought of it, yet there had been nothing to resent in his easy freedom and she was not angry.  The gay deference was still in his eyes, but beneath it she had been conscious for an instant that the whole magnetic current of his personality flowed to her through his look.  That the glance he had bent